Mission pizza shop a haven in the storm

Jag Gill, owner of Mission City Pizza, served more than 700 people Friday night as the lights went out in Mission. Gill and his employees made between over 500 pizzas, as well as wings and lasagne.Jason Payne / PNG

Through the ice-battered windshield, John Welsh could see a faint glow emanating from the only pizza shop open in Mission on Friday night.

All around, the city was dark.

“Like a scene from the Walking Dead,” he said Saturday, recalling the ice storm that blew through the city. “The stoplights were black — not even flashing. It was eerie.”

After a detour around a fallen tree, Welsh and his cousin pulled up to Mission City Pizza. Inside, warmed by the pizza oven, dozens of customers waited.

Right on time, Welsh’s order came up — three cheese, pineapple, and pepperoni pizzas, piping hot.

Back into the night, over freezing roads, the men drove slowly home with the food. They hooked a DVD player to their small generator and settled in for the night.

Back at Mission City Pizza, the oven continued cranking out pies — providing a hot meal to more than 700 customers — until 10 p.m. when they ran out of food.

“At that point, we’d sold everything,” said owner Jag Gill.

When the power at the restaurant on 7th Avenue first went out at 11 a.m. on Friday, Gill headed to the store to buy a generator. The store was closed. But he met another customer outside who was hoping to return a generator he’d previously purchased. They made a deal, and Mission City Pizza was back in business by 1:30 p.m.

As the freezing rain fell and word got out that there was only one business open in the storm, the restaurant got “crazy busy.”

Gill’s staff, many of them family, agreed to make deliveries to people — “mostly moms with kids” — who didn’t have power and couldn’t get out of their houses. “They were very grateful,” he said.

The phone rang off the hook with orders. Some calls were from nearby Abbotsford.

When the food ran out, the restaurant closed, but Gill’s staff stayed behind to prepare for Saturday.

Andy Gaskin joked that the pizza “saved our lives.”

It may not have done that, but it did make a stormy night better for the visitor from Leicester, England.

When Gaskin left home, the UK was in the grip of a snow storm. Touching down in Vancouver, it was “déjà vu,” he said. He thought the freezing rain, which coated everything in a layer of ice, was “spectacular.”

“Lying in bed on (Friday night), we could hear the branches breaking. It was quite incredible.”

On Facebook, grateful customers thanked Mission City Pizza for being a haven in the storm.

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